Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The Law: Theatre of the Absurd

...Nearly a half-century ago, they determined that "privacy" is a fundamental right guaranteed by the United States Constitution. Of course, no right of privacy is literally mentioned in the Constitution, but no matter: You can find it in the document's "penumbra" if you wear the right kind of juridical reading glasses. And so in the Griswold v. Connecticut decision (1965), the Supreme Court discovered that, because of this right of privacy, married couples have a constitutional right to practice contraception. A few years later (in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision), this led to a new discovery, namely the constitutional right to kill unborn babies. By the early 21st century (in the Lawrence v. Texas ruling), the Court had discovered a constitutional right to sodomy. In the future, the Court will probably discover a right to same-sex marriage, and after that (who can doubt it?) a right to polygamy.

Now, the normal human mind, seeing that the right to privacy leads to the absurd conclusion that the U.S. Constitution is an instrument made to protect abortion, sodomy, same-sex marriage, polygamy, and God knows what else, would pause and say: "Maybe we made a mistake with our initial premise of privacy." But not the judicial mind. It says instead: "If a certain constitutional theory leads to absurdity, then we must conclude that absurdity is what James Madison and the Framers of the Constitution intended. Long live absurdity!"